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“Did it feel disloyal to Emma, to read the file?” Kristin asks. She is not interested in procedure, only in feelings.
You have to examine if you’re knitting back together or if you’re simply growing defensive armor over the wound.”
The girl laid out before them is gone, but she can still speak and tell her story, if someone cares enough to listen close.
For Emma, the scent of the hunt is the smell of human putrefaction.
“Attending to your safety” is code for not wearing short skirts, or drinking in bars, or having any kind of life.
“Daniel Huxton was questioned twice by detectives while he had women—including me—stashed away in his basement. Both times, he was released. Don’t be the guy who lets this perpetrator walk out of the station to find another girl to abduct and rape and torture to death. This is going to sound like lame advice, but trust your instincts. Listen for the ping. And good hunting.”
“People only listen when women expose their pain, I suppose. Why do you think it’s like that?”
“How the lit lake shines.…” Simon smiles at her.
“I am a sadist, true, but I don’t really ‘get off on it’ in the sense you mean. I find it heightening, but not arousing. My creations were never really part of a sexualized power fantasy, although there are people who are considerably less particular.”
“They were all found in the gutter, weren’t they?” He looks at her for a response, and when she’s too slow, he turns side-on. “Maybe go away and read the case file properly. You could come back next week sometime.…”
“What do you think, Emma? Do you think my lawyers will save me from lethal injection this time?” “It’s the electric chair in Massachusetts,” she points out. “Well, that’s appropriately gothic, I suppose.”
She’s noticed how the police avoid personalizing the victims, sticking to anonymous phrases like “Victim One” or “the second victim” or “the third case.” But Kristin remembers all their names. To her, they are Geraldine and Marilyn and Patricia, and each of them was a girl, a unique girl, whole and complete and alive.
Faces are so much more interesting and revealing than inert facts, and each of the girls in this case has a pleasing similarity. To her eye, they are like a three-part harmony: the same melody sung in a different but consonant key, with the same rhythm.…
Simon rarely lies. He obfuscates, or diverts the conversation, or he simply refuses to answer. He’ll reply to a question with a question of his own.
he wields honesty like a sword. And he will cut through your heart with any information you share, which is something he does almost without thinking.
girls are the ones who always end up victimized, abused, tortured, dead.
“Are you here to discover more information you could doubtless figure out on your own?
Control is only potent when it’s wielded,
a quote she likes by Adrienne Rich: Her wounds came from the same source as her power.
“I don’t wholly trust the police to look after you, but I know Mr. Bell will.
“You didn’t survive Huxton because of worthiness, Emma.” He looks at her. “I don’t know how you survived. But what really matters is that you’re surviving now, in spite of everything. That survival is all down to your strength of character and will. That survival makes you a fucking force of nature.”
the irony that she has to claim connection with one man to avoid another.
She waits until no one else is around before she picks up her water glass, clenches her fingers around it, weighs it in her hand. The urge to throw it at the wall is almost overpowering, but in the end, she sets the glass down again.
because feeling guilt and shame, believing you’re at fault somehow, is a way of saying that you can stop it from happening again.
She reminds herself that vulnerability itself is not a weakness, that it’s possible to be vulnerable without regret.
When she turns toward Bell, his eyes hold her. “I’m not gonna ask you if you’re okay,” he says softly. “Can I help?”
It’s ironic, Kristin thinks, that law enforcement is the service everyone is supposed to call in an emergency, because law enforcement personnel are truly dreadful at dealing with a crisis.
“What should we give them this time, do you think?” “Well, there are any number of options.…” Kristin considers. “I think we’re looking for a very lonely young man, don’t you?” Simon smiles. “I don’t imagine you would kidnap young ladies and squeeze all the life out of them if you weren’t lonely. It would be a lot of trouble to go to if you were simply doing it out of spite.”
All she can do is look to her brother. “I was so happy in Massachusetts. Do you think we’ll ever go back there again?” “No, Kristin.” He is gazing at her lovingly, sadly. “No, I don’t believe so.”
Simon knows what he is; there is nothing she might say that will be a revelation to him.
“It’s the nature of life to be pointless, Emma. Mayflies fluttering for a single glorious day… Existence has no real meaning—I thought you knew that. We shine briefly, and are extinguished.”
Simon shows his large, empty palms. “That’s everything I have. You’ve wrung me dry of truth. All that stands between us now are these bars.”
“Am I not the only one to have seen your agony and looked you in the eye afterward?”
“To view is to witness—it’s not a passive act.” Simon’s eyes peer out from below the fall of his white hair. “I ask only that you stand witness to my throes, as I stood witness to yours.”
“Hey, any day I get to hold a gun to Simon Gutmunsson’s head is a good day.” Travis snorts.
predilections…” He rolls the term in his mouth; such a courteous-sounding word for the urge to enjoy the rape and torture of women.
Monsters are people, and they’re living among us.
Why, Travis thinks, why why why would anyone find any pleasure in seeing women hurt, when it’s a billion times more pleasurable to see them happy?
“The Christian god of sacrifice.” Simon’s eyes light. “Think not that I am come to bring peace on earth: I came not to bring peace, but a sword.”
“I came here with you to show you,” Travis blurts suddenly. “I want you to see that you can trust me. That I’m on your side. That I choose you. Emma, I would choose you over an FBI order every time.”
There’s a seemingly bottomless reserve of these grasping, hungry men. These pathetic, selfish men, who feel entitled to take what they want with no regard for anyone else, and without consequences.
“You smell of blood,” he whispers. But his eyes are glinting with amusement, and instead of an attack, he lowers his head toward hers. With a crawling shock of horror, she feels his lips touch her skin as he kisses her gently on the cheek.
Something else he has never seen before: Emma, open. Tears leaking down her cheeks as she clasps his hand and bends closer, presses her forehead gently to his. And my god, what he feels for this girl. His torn heart leaps inside his broken chest, and it should be painful, but somehow it isn’t. He releases her fingers so he can cup her cheek, swipe her tears with his thumb—her skin is soft as she leans into his hand. “Travis,” she whispers, and this is another revelation.
“Farewell! A word that must be, and hath been—a sound which makes us linger; yet, farewell! Ye who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene which is his last, if in your memories dwell a thought which once was his, if on ye swell a single recollection, not in vain he wore his sandal-shoon and scallop shell; Farewell! With him alone may rest the pain, if such there were—with you, the moral of his strain.”
